All heart and too little sense

The exit through the elegant Melbourne streets in August 1860 of Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills with their entourage of clutter-bearing imported camels is one of the grand set-pieces of Australian mythology. As a child of the Aussie diaspora, I spent many hours contemplating their proud departure from the city in a reproduction of Sidney Nolan's well-known painting of the scene that my parents, nostalgic for heat, sunlight and adventure, had hung on the kitchen wall of our English home.

Before I knew much about anything, I knew that the dry bones of the two explorers had come back to town in boxes.

The story of their journey across a vast, unexplored continent and halfway home again contains all the elements of tragedy. In The Dig Tree, Sarah Murgatroyd picks her way with forensic care through a tangle of flawed character, fatal nearmisses, betrayals, dignified last words, and dubious maps. The exemplary sufferings of these men of civilisation defeated by the outback have been domesticated by urban Australian culture in the 150 years since: retold, written-up, packaged and displayed in countless histories, novels, paintings and jokes.

In my mind's eye, I can still see the spine of the family copy of Cooper's Creek, Alan Moorehead's classic 1960s retelling of the story, and, further along the bookshelf, Voss, Patrick White's metaphysical novel of the bush, in which the cultivated European explorer-hero sees the sublime in the dust and scrub, sensing that "in this disturbing country it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and attempt the infinite". Crossing Australia is imagined by Voss as a quest of love for the undiscovered country. "I will cross the continent from one end to the other," he promises. "I have every intention to know it with my heart."

In Murgatroyd's view, the undoing of the Victorian Exploring Expedition was principally a consequence of the besetting pride of its leader, Burke, a maverick Irish policeman, all heart and too little sense.

He saw his journey from Victoria to the north coast as a territorial race against South Australia's more successful Scottish explorer, John McDouall Stuart. Burke also hoped that his heroism would win him the affections of a beguiling little Melbourne actress half his age named Julia Matthews. His infatuation became a geographical fact when he dedicated a river to her in the swamps at the top of the continent.

Land was for the taking in those early days of Australian settlement, for financial as well as sentimental gain. Murgatroyd carefully evokes the various business and scientific interests behind the Exploring Expedition, and the catastrophic dithering of the learned societies that hindered its rescue. Little thought or respect was given to the indigenous aboriginal tribes who, had it not been for Burke's pride, might have taught him how to make the nardoo plant digestible and saved him and Wills from the malnutrition that killed them. Deserts seem to confound prose. "If only Burke had been a writer," Murgatroyd laments as she considers the mere 850 words that his leather-bound diary contains, wishing he had left us more traces of the pathos in his journeying. Her own descriptive metaphors - rivers look like "ribbons", expanses like "patchwork", birdcalls sound like "creaking doors" - reduce the outback to the dimensions of a Melbourne parlour, suggesting that it may be better to say too little than to try to domesticate it in language.

For the most part, though, her writing is spare and dry enough and keeps close to the track. In Murgatroyd's rendition, the Burke-and-Wills story is more sad than thrilling. But despite all her worthy demythologising, it remains an Australian archetype. There must be many a settled, city-dwelling family which keeps among its precious things some record, like my great-grandfather Liddy's laconic notebook, of its pioneering past. Liddy kept a better diary than Burke. After a hard day's ride on a hungry, "tender-footed" horse through sand that "blew and blew", he wrote simply: "Very down on it, thinking of home and what fools we were to leave it. It is a tragic country here."